About Generate By Design

Generate By Design is a garden project about how life gathers around a place through food, flowers, habitat, beauty and the pleasure of growing.

It unfolds within a flourishing Australian native garden on a sunny hill in Melbourne’s east. I’m adding vegetables, herbs, fruit, edible and cut flowers, propagation, and more Australian natives, shaping a productive layer that feels considered and sculptural within the surrounding garden.

The site follows that work over time, from the former garden and the native garden that followed it to the planting now filling out and the productive experiments already underway

The Garden

The native garden gives Generate By Design its shape, continuity and abundance.

Over the two years since, the planting has filled out, shifted with the seasons and become richer and more abundant. Some spaces were deliberately left open for future use. Elsewhere, the garden has changed naturally as plants have flourished, settled in or occasionally failed.

I now tend the garden as it continues to grow and change, working within my physical limits and with an occasional hand from Jay. Alongside that care, I’m adding food, flowers, propagation and more Australian natives, shaping a productive layer that feels lush, considered and sculptural within the garden around it.

Miranda Black

I’ve always been interested in how design can make everyday life more beautiful, useful and alive.

I’m a Melbourne-based creative with a background in design communications. Generate By Design brings that way of thinking into the garden, where I’m learning through tending, growing, photographing, experimenting and paying close attention to what changes over time.

I live with a dynamic illness, so my relationship with the garden changes from day to day. Some days I can plant, propagate or take on a practical job. On others, the work might be observation, planning, photography or one well-timed decision. I’m interested in building a creative life that remains ambitious, abundant and responsive to the body I have.

Beyond the garden, I’m developing A’Vard Studio and writing Designing Life Chronicle, where the wider ideas around design, embodiment and creative life have more room to unfold.